In this paper we attempt a self-contained approach to infinite dimensional Hamiltonian systems appearing from holomorphic curve counting in Gromov-Witten theory. It consists of two parts. The first one is basically a survey of Dubrovin’s approach to bihamiltonian tau-symmetric systems and their relation with Frobenius manifolds. We will mainly focus on the dispersionless case, with just some hints on Dubrovin’s reconstruction of the dispersive tail. The second part deals with the relation of such systems to rational Gromov-Witten and Symplectic Field Theory.

We will use Symplectic Field theory of S¹×M as a language for the Gromov-Witten theory of a closed symplectic manifold M. Such language is more natural from the integrable systems viewpoint. We will show how the integrable system arising from Symplectic Field Theory of S¹×M coincides with the one associated to the Frobenius structure of the quantum cohomology of M.